More thoughts on blogging and the Arts

In every issue of Today, Blogsphere recommends blog entries to read based on a specific topic. Also, there was an article on food blogs and they contain reviews as well as recipes. Some are even business projects to market food! Another was on the wariness of including personal details in one's blogs for fear of them being used against one's own advantage. After reading it, I checked my entries and profile to ensure I was not revealing unnecessary details about myself.

A fourth one lamented that blogs tend to be negative rather than positive in content. I did write about this in a much earlier entry. Some bloggers use the opportunity to scandalise people they detest on the pretext of venting their frustrations out and sharing their subjective thoughts. This article only serves to affirm what I had mentioned earlier. Still, there are blogs that are positive in nature. A photographer used his blog to highlight the plight of a sick girl who needed financial aid. True enough, funds were raised for her to enable her to go for her operation. Blogs are powerful but it's really how one makes use of them to make a difference to others.

I update my blog mainly for my students so that they can improve their English language in the process of reading it.

Singapore has become more open to the Arts as the decades pass. I'm not referring to merely movies and television programmes that are churned out annually by production houses but to performances like dances, musical concerts and theatrical productions. Even museum exhibitions are part of the menu too.

Clara Chow wrote an article in Life about including the Arts as part of parenting. Yes, children can be noisy but as she suggested, there can be time slots reserved solely for families with young children, which other countries do. Students do get some exposure to the Arts but coupled with the focus on other subjects they take, it doesn't add up to much, so what more such families?

It's so true that children have the perception that "culture consumption is an occasional excursion" because of the de-emphasis on the Arts. Somehow society tends to regard people who major in it as less intelligent. Are they really so? Such graduates exude an aura of character refinement as well as emotional maturity in their character, I feel. It's time artistic participation became "a norm".

Ultimately though, it's really up to the parents to cultivate a love for the Arts in their kids, as Clara sums up, since they are the kids' first teachers.